I came across the concept of Social Entrepreneurship recently, I never knew this was even something that existed. That led me to believe that we tend to think entrepreneurship is something business people do to start something new never done before. And that we are all indeed entrepreneurs. As bloggers we have the potential to reach a wide and diverse audience from all corners of the globe, whether we make money from it or not. We are putting our ideas and thoughts and feelings out there and one of these could somehow inspire someone to do something great in the world, or help someone who was at wit’s end, or even just made someone laugh. I tend to agree with your friend, we are all entrepreneurs in some form or another.

The above piece is a comment I left on Mel’s blog, Stirrup-Queens. In her post today, Why Everyone Creative Should Be Listening to Gimlet Media she talks about the Start Up podcast about how Alex Blumberg starts up a new business.

It led me down the path of wondering whether we, as bloggers, whether we make money or not from blogging, are entrepreneurs as well.

In the traditional sense, an entrepreneur is “a person who organises and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.” This is the prevailing, mainstream definition. 

Social Entrepreneurship applies business methods to solving social problems. The focus shifts from enriching shareholders  to enriching society.  The solutions to social problems are almost always innovative as they need to be. These are people that see an opportunity where no other has, they look beyond the immediate problem, taking a systems view, seeing how changing one small thing now will affect the broader community or society later.

The person most social entrepreneurship talks mention is the founder of Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, who provided micro loans to the traditionally unbankable people in rural India. He saw that by providing small loans to people he was helping them become self-sufficient, building small business that would support their families and having a positive impact in their society. He awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his achievements.

I posit to you, that as bloggers, we are a type of social entrepreneur. Our writings go around the world many times  a day. You never know who is being impacted by it and that your words may have helped someone in a tight spot. That our words can mean something to someone other than ourselves. That something we have written could have sown the seed in someone’s mind to help solve a social problem.

Is this a long-shot or a plausible idea?